Fictional, essayistic film- documentarymaker who, in his travelogues, investigates life and filmmaking. His concerns can be political, humorous, pessimistic, realistic or dreamlike. He was co-founder of Filmstad Den Haag, that produced many shorts made by artist and organized festivals and many filmevents. Born on a boat in 1962 on the wrong side of the river.

Self-deprecation and Weltschmerz go hand in hand in this road movie about an wannabe artist with a mid-life crisis searching for his adoptive father in Latin America. His quest follows the bloody trail of his eccentric family. Does the key to salvation lie in the desiccated pampas?

The film is the dream of the real mother of the maker, about a young dark filmmaker who travels through many European and Asian countries looking for knowledge. This globetrotting, epic fabrication is the stubborn proof that people discover the most adventurous panoramas via detours.
The latest film from IFFR regular Jan Willem van Dam has the structure of a dream about a filmmaker’s life, dreamt by a mother (played by the filmmaker's own mother). ‘In your mother’s dream, you do as she says.’ Comments on current affairs and personal reveries go hand-in-hand with observations on film, filmmaking and the life of a filmmaker. The dream has epic proportions: it is a travelogue passing through many European countries, then finally Asia and ‘the island of honest actors’. To understand the world, it is necessary to travel it, the mother says - and this is what the young filmmaker does. With an adult voice-over, he is played by ten-year-old Chanoah Jap Ngie. The film’s reflective, improvised docu-realism is interrupted by a stylised short film, The Unprecedented Thirst for Freedom of Private L.B., which ‘bubbles to the surface’ when the young filmmaker receives an sms from his producer reminding him to make a film. (Gerwin Tamsma IFFR)

Film about Georgia after the Rose Revolution, with leading roles for a sturdy agent of the Secret Service and a beautiful 16-year-old dream of. Both play themselves. A both timeless and topical film, with beautiful and occasionally disturbing encounters in a fairytale land.
The films of Jan Willem van Dam - strictly speaking they are videos these days - have a very special place in the expanding area between fiction and documentary. `The protagonists play their own roles, just as this is expected of them in real life,' according to the maker. When Light Behaves Differently Towards Time was filmed in Georgia, in the period after the Rose Revolution. Nini Sardlishvili (16) talks about her life and dreams. She describes how, at the age of three, she was taken from her bed by an unknown man, who took her out and showed her the world. The next morning, Nini is back home and her mother finds cigarette ash on her pillow. 'It was both strange and beautiful,' according to Nini. It is Gocha Ovashvili, agent of the Georgian Internal Security Service, who shows us Georgia. Against the background of the enchanting landscape of the Caucasian republic, he meets the local people during his hunt for criminals and talks to them about the hard struggle that is their everyday life. While the lyrical and the timeless are both predominant - as is usual with Van Dam - the images he 'finds' are sometimes alarming and topical. We hear about Russian bombardments in the Chechen border area and about Abkhazian slave traders, we see burned-out Soviet archives and the population decline in mountain villages. In the meantime, Nini Sardlischvili works hard on her own future. (Gerwin Tamsma IFFR)

What You Expect… captures sisters Manon and Madou Engels on holiday in Tuscany. At times they are in the landscape talking to each other, at other times to the locals or observing some local event. The camera follows them around and at times stops to contemplate the landscape itself. Are we watching a documentary, an essay film, an experimental contemplation, a fiction film? Is it just a travelogue, is it making a political point, is it about memory, about existence? The film hovers in-between to open up a space in such grey areas, this no-man’s land. It slumbers in these shadows of form and representation, as you would travelling through Tuscany in summer. Time has stopped, time is irrelevant. It is the landscape that exists. But there are laid back conversations taking place between the film’s subjects and between the film and its audience. This film converses with the territory opened up by such work as Godard’s Weekend (as its end-point) and Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia (as its echo). A difference is that that was film and this is video, more fluid, like water, finding its level. This Tuscany is the landscape in which Nostalgia was shot and there are anecdotes from the locals about their experiences of the Tarkovskys. These revelations are encountered rather than introduced. There is a small overgrown abandoned house where Tarkovsky is supposed to have stayed: a trace of a trace. We are and we are not connected.(Gerwin Tamsma IFFR)

Inspired by 'The Islands' by Albert Alberts, a film-maker looks up his old Dutch teacher. The only task he gets is to conquer the world.
The book The Islands by Albert Alberts motivated Jan Willem van Dam to look up his Dutch teacher secondary school, Father G.C.M. Pijnenborg.'The film comprises images of dark landscapes, reminiscent of some Russian films, tranquil pictures of the refectory in the Jesuit monastery where the former teacher lives, but also acted scenes. Van Dam seems to be looking for an attitude to life and shows en passant the forgotten, hidden 'tone' of an apparently lost Holland.The film-maker directed his documentary with a quote from Nietzsche in mind: `In the ascetic ideal, so many bridges to independence are indicated, that a philosopher cannot listen without inner jubilation or applause to the story of all those resolute individuals who once said no to all the lack of freedom and headed into some desert. Even when they were only strong donkeys and the complete opposite of the strong spirit.'

An acquintence of the filmmaker killed a man and kept the body in his house for 5 years. Is there an answer to that? Two brothers live in a Godforsaken land and meet the murderer. They have some questions.

Based on a radio interview in which a girl tells about her parents. In their house they were always naked. This caused a rather problematic youth. The film follows the girl while encountering a young man.
. Kakaja Zemlja
16 mm 20 min. / 1992
Een zwart/ wit film over de Rusische kunstenaar Igor Yaruskin. Hij schildert volgens West Europese traditie en maakt muziek en drinkt volgens Russische traditie. In woord en zang geeft hij zijn visie op zijn land en zijn leven. De film verwoordt en verbeeldt de strijd tussen een kunstzinnig- en een arbeidzaam leven in de laatste maanden van het Sovjet systeem.

‘Kakaja Zemlja’ is a micro portrait of unfashionable, unwieldy painter, Igor Yaruskin, from Leningrad, during the time of Perestroika. Somehow this quirky redundant subject manages to capture something of the times. Inside the home we seem to be viewing a past that never existed but somehow through the convergence of history, exists now. It is the film’s disjointed, menial construction that reinforces this impression. Yaruskin belongs but does not belong at the same time, and like Schrodinger’s cat, it just depends when you do the looking. (Sense of cinema)